Goodbye Panda

I'm not sure from where or when, but there is a story that has been stuck in my head for years about using a panda as a way to distract foolish onlookers. "Hey, kids, look at the panda!" is a phrase that has repeated itself in my inner monologue countless times. This typically comes up in situations where quick, slight-of-hand shenanigans would provide a momentary lapse in concentration thereby allowing some simultaneous shady act to go unnoticed. Perhaps it was the punchline of a joke. Whatever this was made a lasting enough impression on me that it has now become synonymous with my mind's coping mechanism of using the trauma with my mother as a distraction to keep me from acknowledging, dealing with, and healing from the darker truths that laid dormant far beneath.

I spent over two decades of my life living my mother's story instead of my own. I was overly obsessed with helping her, assuring the care she needed, understanding her illness, finding a diagnosis that made sense, and later assuming care and becoming financially responsible for her. I also venture to say that much of my hyperdrive overachievement in life has to do with my desire to get to a place where I could care for her. In some ways I became a mother at age 12 and had to procure and ensure safety and prosperity for both of us. (See earlier post on Growing up with Schizophrenic Mother for more details.)

At times I recognized the relative unhealth of this behavior and indeed I had many hypotheses for it. That I needed to fix her. That I needed to relieve my guilt of not preventing her suicide attempts. That I needed to pay penance for not being able to keep her well. That maybe someday I could even regain her love. It saddens me to write this now because, at 38, I see how very much of my time and energy was lavished on these needless and fruitless activities.

When I first began meeting with Em we used drawing therapy to extract and articulate the pain I was experiencing before I recognized it as The Breakthrough Crisis. At the time I only knew that my life was in disarray and my mother seemed to be the cause of that pain - or so I had assumed for many years. All of my drawing therapy centered around mother. Em asked prompting questions to which I drew out the answers. It went something like this...

• How do you feel right now? My artful representation was of me with lightning bolts for hair, drowning in plane tickets and work documents, surrounded by piles of money that I could neither reach nor spend, with all of the things I longed for (community, social life, free time, family) far off in the distance.
• What is your biggest problem? This one shows me on  my knees begging for my mother to love me while she sits silent and ignoring me while smoking cigarettes. In the background are all of the things I've done and bought for her and, ironically, a pile of money that I later recognized was a mirror image from my first drawing.
• What will it look like when your biggest problem is solved? I went numb. I sat and stared. My throat grew hot and then closed up; I began to cough. I had to run to the bathroom for a glass of water. We were at Zi's house (Em's friend) who was visiting in Bali for the month and the pipes had frozen so there was no water. I was able to calm myself with deep breathing before returning to our therapy room.

The body has a funny way of telling us things if only we will listen. I wasn't ready to hear what my body had to say, but I was being prepared. I was able to complete the drawing after thinking about it for awhile. At first I saw no solution. I divided the paper in half and drew a picture of mom and I holding hands and smiling, then immediately put a big black X through it. I then drew what I understood to be the real (and only possible) solution which is a picture of myself in meditative position feeling happy, healthy, and well all by myself. This icon became a theme in my mind's eye and in my journals for months.

It wasn't until the appearance of The Black Oil that I began to understand my mother was only the surface issue.  After many months of therapy, EMDR, and recovered memories (see The Theatre and On Shame) I now understand what and why I was hiding. What an amazing and resilient little brain I must've had in order to cover my trauma truth for so long. This charade parade made me incredibly functional but also inordinately fragmented. To not have access to my full self, to divert my focus onto a decoy for so many years, to treat my mind-body like a machine - always demanding and never recognizing limitations - all of this came at a cost. 

Now that I am acknowledging and confronting the layers of my trauma onion, I am paying myself back bit by bit for what was lost. I can never regain it all; some things are gone forever. And for that I am deeply grievous. But I am now able to take care of myself in a way I could or would not before. I am kind to myself. I have oodles of self-compassion and grace when I fall short. I look for signs of fatigue and depletion, and I restore and rebuild when needed. I surround myself with things and people who give me energy and add to my life. I no longer force myself to do things I "should" when they are things that make me feel bad. This includes discontinuing the charade with my mother (fully elaborated in Healthy Boundaries.)

Em and I did a second drawing therapy session many months later and I was mesmerized by the stark contrast. First, I noticed that in my second set I was clothed where I had been exposed in all of the first drawings. Mother was no longer in any of my drawings; upon this revelation I was not upset, I merely accepted. Perhaps most interesting was the change in my viewpoint. The first drawings were myopic, situation specific. The later drawings were teaming with ideas, people, places and included a variety of settings. The multilayered complexity and beauty of my life without charades was being revealed. And unlike my first set where I was off to the side, my later drawings showcase me at the center: calm and radiant.

And so it is with great pleasure that I bid adieu to the decoy, to the distraction, but ultimately to my pretending and fragmented self once and for all. "Say goodbye, panda!"

The Wolf

For a long, long time I blamed myself for not stopping or preventing the assaults from my abuser. The self-blame was so harsh and so deep that I understand now this is likely why I hid the truth from myself for nigh 25 years. I thought it was my fault. I must have done something to spur or invite the violation, as mentioned in my post On Shame. I wasn't even able to control my body's response to the assaults. I wasn't smart enough, adept enough, strong enough, or good enough. I wasn't enough. Period.

My journal is rife with passages denoting my foolishness, stupidity, and cowardice. During EMDR and tonglen exercises on The Theatre I was clearly able to get in touch with my supporters' tender emotions toward the victimized Little Me. St. Francis wept and wept for the sorrow inside that young violated girl. Jesus was so enraged that we had to hold him back from punching my abuser in the face. I found this both humorous and comforting. As for me, I felt no compassion for Little Me. Dee asked me to imagine how I would feel if it were some other young girl in that situation. Instantly my feelings would morph into sadness, grief, and despair. But when focused on the actual me, I could only conjure remnants of disgust. Dee said that was the part which needed healing the most.

We zeroed in on this self-disgust on a quest towards dissolution. Dee challenged me, as she often did in the most insightful and poignant ways, to consider my humanity. What if, because I am human, I did want the attention, the affection, the comfort, and the pleasure? This question instantly brought out The Black Oil but it also unlocked a heretofore unnoticed pattern. When Dee asked about comfort, I immediately thought about the sound of my abuser's voice. At once I realized that in all of my abuse memories he had been mute. In fact in my mind's eye he had no mouth at all, much like in The Matrix during Neo's interrogation. Memories of my assailant had consisted mostly of his piercing blue eyes, his profile in various abuse scenarios, the feel of his hands, the sickeningly sweet smell of laundry soap (the origin of this nosmic memory will be revealed in The Terrible Awful), but no mouth and no words. Until now.

All of the sudden, I was aware that his voice had been a source of great comfort to me. The simple act of reaching for those memories washed a wave of warmth over me.

He was the one I talked to during the trauma of my mother's suicide attempts.
He was the only one asking me how I was, how I felt.
I trusted him.
In fact, I loved him in the way that a scared child clings to an adult in times of need.
And then he betrayed me.

Something happened inside me upon this revelation. This knowing of intermingled love and betrayal opened up my compassion for Little Me. I wasn't stupid, I was betrayed! I wasn't a coward, I was manipulated! Until this point, the muted monster in my memory was so clearly a predator that I could not help but blame myself for my failure of not knowing better. Doesn't the gazelle recognize the lion by instinct? But this isn't how it happened at all. He garnered and then abused my trust. He endeared himself to me - the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing.

The monster had been identified for precisely who and what he was. He was both the good and the bad wolf.
And in either case, I was innocent.

The ASCA Survivor to Thriver Manual has much to say on the topic of unraveling self-blame:

Survivors grow up believing the classic myth of child abuse: that they, not their parents or abusers, were somehow responsible for the abuse. "I let him do it to me." "I should have been able to protect myself." "I liked certain aspects of the abuse, the attention, the gifts, the pleasurable sensations, the sense of being special." The child's often distorted perceptions of who was responsible are enhanced by the abusers' indictments [such as] "I am showing you how much I love you." These words are truly toxic because they do more than simply and unjustly place the blame for the abuse on your shoulders. They eat away at your positive sense of self, and the lingering messages continue to do so in your adult life.

You need to understand that you were the child and that you had neither the power nor the authority to make your abusers do anything to you. The abuse was their responsibility because, quite simply, they had the greater power and they did it to you. Nothing you could have done would have changed this, because families and society are set up to give power and authority to adults. Children have little or no power over their abuse, or much of anything else. 

 As a child, you were not psychologically equipped to believe that what your abusers were doing was wrong, much less speak out about it. Because you were dependent on them for so much, you couldn't risk alienating them by speaking the truth even if your child mind was precocious enough to make sense of the complex web of issues that comprises child abuse. Few, if any, children can do this effectively because their intellectual capacities are not sufficiently developed to do so. You desperately wanted to love them and be loved by them. It would have been foolish for you to incur their wrath and dash whatever hope of love, caring, and nurturing you harbored inside. Think back to what it would have meant for you, the child, to accept that the people who were supposed to love you were actually hurting you. It's not surprising that few children can face this horrible reality, because to do so would cause them to become emotional orphans in the process, and little could be worse than that.

Step five of The Manual is "I accept that I was powerless over my abuser's actions which holds THEM responsible." This is when true healing began for me. Healing is transformation, and transformation is only possible through changing one's perspective from within.  It took years of therapy for me to get to this place, but the unlocking of self-compassion was my turnkey moment. I no longer needed to forgive myself, for there was no transgression to forgive. Knowing this truth set me free from the blame and shame game I had played for far too many years. In my heart of hearts, I was no longer at fault.

I thought for some time that this is where my memory journey would make the upward turn. I was sorely mistaken. A darker, scarier truth lay far beneath the surface - one that would never have revealed itself until Puzzle Pieces connected and Shame was nearly dissolved. Now that I had full compassion for self, I was ready to know the rest of The Terrible Awful story.

On Shame

If anger is a surface emotion then shame is the bottomless pit far beneath. Jungian analysts say that shame is the "swampland of the soul." Research shows that shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, suicidal thoughts, and eating disorders. I have experienced d) all of the above.

Rage shattered the wall of my silent shame. I began having more abuse memories, so many that I had to name the events so that Dee and I could use a common framework for discussion. At first they came in the form of dreams or in lucid states upon waking, some of them nightmarish. Soon these morphed into body memories which could then be reprocessed and associated via EMDR. Sometimes these puzzle pieces would connect amidst activities like driving or running. Other times they came in the middle of my supposed functional workday. I found the latter particularly disturbing. It was one thing to have memories while alone in a safe environment where I could feel and process what was happening; it was an altogether different experience when I was around people with no place to hide. I had to pretend and keep going, not feel, to be on stage and en pointe. This was a harrowing time for me. I felt like I was falling apart. Fragmentation, guilt, shame and fear plagued me from all sides, but none more pressing than the in-side.

The Hand: I have a distinct memory of being touched while in bed. This was the first one to surface after The Theatre and was difficult for me to acknowledge. Previously I had convinced myself that The Theatre was the only scene of abuse but in this new memory I am in a lying down position, one not possible in a theatre setting. A bed, perhaps not mine. I have no external context for this memory - no understanding of the room, furniture, or house - but an immense amount of detail. Exactly opposite of The Theatre, where I have tons of context but little to no detail. The Hand is touching me - as in my lovely little lady parts - from behind and I am pretending to be asleep. I am hoping that if I lie still and quiet it will all be over soon, much like the stone statue in The Theatre. And likely in a similar fully dissociated state.

Please Don't: Another memory, another position, another time and place. The detail and body memory is different for this event, enough that I am able to distinguish it from The Hand. The most salient piece of this memory is that I feel my body about to sexually climax, but I am praying and begging God to not let it happen. I don't want to. I feel terribly ashamed that this is happening and that my body is responding in this way.

Notable connections and feelings bubbled up during acquisition of these memories. As we processed the events, I was obsessed with my attire. In EMDR sets I would spend an inordinate amount of time "looking" down trying to figure out what I was wearing at the time of the abuse. In my mind, wearing a skirt or nightgown meant that I had given him easy access and was partially to blame. If only I had been smart enough or more careful, I could have prevented it. This is a dangerous rabbit hole for survivors of sexual abuse. It is our #1 fear... that the abuse was somehow our fault. That I showed interest, that I prompted or invited it in some way, that I didn't stop him and therefore that means I must have wanted it. This shame has plagued me for 25 years and is likely the cause of my memory repression and dissociation, aka The Black Oil.

Here is where I tell you how very much I love my therapist Dee for moments like this one. After weeks of obsessing over my attire and the thought of possibly inviting the abuse, she called me out. Inching closer to the front edge of her chair, she looked right into my tear-filled eyes and said, "I don't care if you stood up in that theatre, stripped all of your clothes off and danced around in front of him naked. You were a child. He was an adult. It was his responsibility to hold the boundary and he didn't. There is nothing you could've done to make this your fault and so I want you to stop this clothing bullshit here and now." Her exasperation and brutal honesty shocked the obsession right out of me. I haven't thought about my attire in these or any other abuse memories since.

I have learned through therapy and my healing process that shame and self-blame is often the only way a child can make sense of the terrible trauma of sexual abuse. Uneducated and inexperienced with how the body works, the resulting physical pleasure from unwanted touch is confusing. This response gets misinterpreted by a child as fault when it is anything but. Furthermore, it is easier to blame the self than to acknowledge and understand that adults are not trustable and that the world is indeed a scary place. If only we were told the truth: that monsters are real and they don't live under your bed. They live down the street, in your neighborhood, in your backyard. And sometimes they live at your uncle's house.

Brene Brown says that shame requires 3 things to survive: secrecy, silence, and judgement. My story had equal, hefty doses of all three for 25 years. Once I understood this I did the most difficult thing imaginable: I started telling my story. First my 2 therapists, next I told my 3 closest friends. It was awful and wonderful at the same time. Content with my close circle of five, I continued with therapy and regular conversation with my small support army for months. I have since shared my story with 5 more trusted people in my life, including 2 family members. My army is growing.

LearningToLiveInsideMyBody is a critical part of my healing journey. To aggregate and articulate my process, to share for the hope of healing for others, to rid myself of the shame that indeed this is my story. Some days I have an enormous vulnerability hangover from what I've posted. Other days I feel superbly healed, that the process of documenting these experiences gets them out, as in out of me. They no longer live inside, swirling around and adding to the Black Oil. My story lives on these pages, my computer, the blog server, and now your screen.

A few days ago I made a list in my journal of what complete healing will look like for me. It includes several items related to this topic such as:

• not hiding
• no shame
• no fear that people will find out
• no self injury
• no dissociation
• sleeping all night
• no panic attacks
• no stabbing pain of remembrance
• talking about it with no tears
• no vulnerability hangovers 
• no need for an army
• feeling whole
• freedom

There are many more items on my list. I look forward to the day I get to experience all of them. For now, I am satisfied with shattering the wall and moving forward on this journey.

On Rage

One Sunday in January I went to church as usual. During praise and worship, we sang a song with the lyrics "All things work together for my good" from Romans 8:28. All of the sudden I stopped singing as I felt the familiar lump of impending meltdown welling in my throat. The tears began streaming but it was not the usual variety of grief and despair. This time I was filled with rage - pure, utter, unadulterated rage - so much that my fists were clinched tightly and my fingernails bore into the palms of my hands. I envisioned punching someone in the face. My mind raced....

Really? All things work together for MY good? Because I can't think of one single fucking good thing that can possibly come out of being sexually abused, at least not for me. I am so angry with God for letting this happen. Wasn't I already going through enough at the time with schizophrenic-abandoning mother? Where was God in this? Why didn't he protect me? Why didn't anyone? Am I supposed to think that this was all worth it so I can write a book someday? Does that make my suffering meaningful? Acceptable? Fat. Chance.

I went home and took a nap. A thick, deep, foggy sleep that awoke with a start. I was panicked. Heart racing, anxiety in my throat, the booming sound of heartbeat in my ears and pounding in my chest. I was also, strangely, extremely sexually aroused. I realized then that this had happened no less than 3 times the past few weeks since talking to Dee about The Theatre. The acknowledgement overwhelmed me, as it was this moment I first understood the source of my deep shame. Whatever had happened while I was being molested, my body responded even though I didn't want it to. I must have been aroused by whatever he did to me. And even though I didn't remember what "it" was, my body remembered.

The next morning I experienced a different kind of rage meltdown. As I drove to the airport for my next business trip, I was reflecting on the anger and shame revelation from the previous day. A moment of clarity came and all of that rage was now directed at my body. It betrayed me! There I was in the middle of this horrific circumstance of being sexually abused; I should have been fighting or at least appalled but instead I was aroused? This was unacceptable to me. A completely inappropriate response to the situation (or so I thought). And yet I could not stop it, control it, or even curtail it. I was utterly disgusted with myself and completely furious with my body.

My rage continued to morph into various forms and direct itself toward sundry targets - my boss, myself, God, my real-estate agent, myself again, the driver in front of me taking too long when the light turned green, the grocery store clerk who squashed my loaf of wheat bread, myself again - and then it landed smack dab on the crowned head of my mother. It has been resting there for many months now with no signs of movement. (I write more about this in a later post called The Wolf.)

I've learned that it is important to let myself feel whatever it is I need to feel without judgement or attempts to control it. Just let it be what it is. I spent much too long suppressing and denying my feelings; I need to let them out. Keeping them locked deep inside is what got me here: depressed, anxious, unable to have a functional intimate relationship, lonely, fragmented, dissociated.

Anger and even rage are a necessary part of the healing process. In fact, healing from sexual abuse is much akin to the 7 stages of grief:

1. Shock and Denial: I did this for about, oh, 25 years.
2. Pain and Guilt: Yep, plenty of this.
3. Anger: Thus my rage.
4. Depression: Does near constant suicidal ideation count? Yes, I think it does.
5. Upward Turn
6. Reconstruction
7. Acceptance and Hope

And so I am processing 25 years worth of rage and pain. I told you this is the middle of my story. My sarcasm helps me to see just where I am now, and it appears I have not yet reached the upward turn. But I long for it, I believe in it. 

I believe in hope.

The Theatre

Memory repression is a condition in which details of an event are consciously blocked due to high levels of stress or trauma. Survivors of abuse and those who exhibit symptoms of PTSD commonly experience memory problems and sometimes even have damage in the hippocampus, the area in the brain responsible for memory storage and converting short- to long-term memory. Physical manifestations of repressed memories can show up as irritability, trouble sleeping, emotional numbness, and exaggerated response to surprises or trigger events that conjure trauma remembrance.

Even when memory is repressed by the conscious brain, experts believe that body memory can help recover hidden psychological memories and details. Through therapy, these details can be collected and reprocessed, thereby freeing the rememberer from seemingly inexplicable physical and emotional suffering triggered by reliving subconscious trauma. There is often a memory sliver - a breadcrumb so to speak - that can help elicit and open the door to full remembrance of traumatic events. For me, that sliver was The Theatre.

I always knew something bad happened in The Theatre. Nary a moment did I suspect invalidity of this occurrence though I did not have conscious details of how far it went. I had vivid contextual memory - who I was with, my relative age, transportation to and from, seating arrangement, body position, the fact that we visited the toy store afterward so he could buy my silence, but most importantly the moment when the touching became "not ok." I had no detail beyond that. What I have learned through the course of therapy is that the reason I had no detailed conscious memory is because this is the moment I left my body.

I remember making myself sit perfectly still, thinking that if I were compliant then it would be over faster. I convinced myself that if I could somehow turn into a stone statue then it would be better because stone statues don't feel. And if I didn't feel it, then it wasn't really happened. I was playing a lot of Super Mario Bros. 3 at the time and used the visual of Tanooki's stone statue which Raccoon Mario can turn into at will after he grabs a feather. I remembered this, but what I didn't know was all of the definable steps leading up to the stone statue nor how they related to my dissociation stages.

In the face of trauma, the human mind-body has three possible responses: fight, flight, or freeze. I chose the latter. In fact that is what most children who are being sexually abused do, because there is seemingly no other choice. We are small with little or no strength to fight; he was a 40+ year old man, how could I possibly ward him off? We are reliant upon the care of others; if I fled, where would I go? We are taught to respect authority and obey adults, which too often results in the inability to say no even when we know something is wrong. We are also taught shame from a very early age, which I would soon discover was a significant contributor to my frozen state.

It took me a long time to tell Dee about The Theatre. Seven therapists in 13 years and I had never breathed a word of this to any of them. I never felt comfortable and, quite ironically, I never thought it was relevant. Or perhaps I hoped it wasn't. In some ways the knowledge of this sliver was like a fly buzzing around my therapy sessions. I knew it was there, its appearance and persistence annoyed me at times, but I was able to shoo it away enough to focus on what I considered the real reason I was in the office. (I elaborate on the irony and subconscious functionality of using the masking event of my sick mother to hide the true root cause of my trauma in a later post called Goodbye Panda.)

It wasn't until after the appearance of the Black Oil that it became glaringly apparent something was lurking beneath, a dark demon of shame that was bigger than the problems with my schizophrenic-abandoning mother. Dee and I spent many EMDR sessions focusing on the Black Oil; sometimes I was able to look at it but most of the time it simply forced me out of my body. Those sessions exhausted and depleted me. I lived a hazy existence for weeks, barely functioning at work and in a near zombie-like state around my family during Christmas 2012.

The ASCA Survivor to Thriver Manual lists a series of general steps in the healing journey from child abuse; step two is Acknowledgement. On January 2, 2013 I finally acknowledged that I was sexually abused. During many months of therapy with Dee, she inquired no less than three times about the possibility of abuse during my childhood. Each of her inquiries would produce a dreamlike state wherein I could not form a coherent response. It was as if my lips were buttoned and no words would come out. All I could say is that I had gaps in my memory, that I had an inkling that something happened in a movie theatre, but I wasn't sure if it was real and it made me feel crazy to think about, much less talk about it.

After Dee's third inquiry (which came at the end of a session - ding, ding, time is up!) I went home in an out-of-body state. I trusted her and was ready to talk about it, even if it led to nothing significant. Even if it had no bearing on our work related to schizophrenic-abandoning mother. I had never written about this topic in 25 years, though I have dozens of journals documenting my personal growth. I could not bear to see this story in my own hand writing. And so I typed it out as a draft email with no intended recipient.

The next week on my way to see Dee I had sufficient resolve to share my story. Except I also had an incredible amount of "body stuff"... headaches, nausea, and heavy arms which made it difficult to drive. I even passed her office though I had been there at least 20 times. My mind-body did not want reveal. I had also been doing a lot of fingernail stabbing that week. This is one of my methods of self-injury. I shove my fingernails so far up inside the thumbnail on each hand that they bleed. The pain is satiating in a strange way such that it grounds me and almost feels good, and I have done this for decades in moments of stress. (I write more about my other tendencies for self-injury in a later post called Puzzle Pieces.)

I had been stabbing so much the week leading up to my session with Dee that squeezing a lemon in my Perrier brought me to tears. After talking with Dee, I now know that children are most likely coaxed and/or threatened to keep the abuse secret in ways that get planted in their psyche so deep that they don't even realize it. Likely this stabbing behavior was a way to secretly and subconsciously punish myself for what I was getting ready to do: violate my promise to him that I would never tell.

And so I told her. I think Dee knew for many months that this is where my therapy was headed. She is incredibly insightful and also infinitely gentle; she was patient until I was ready to reveal but in her own way let me know that she also saw the buzzing fly in the room. We later discussed the fact that my symptoms - these dissociative tendencies - are not something that would likely blossom from moments of abandonment, which can be deeply traumatic but not in the freeze variety; nor was this a response to attempts of suicide, which calls for action not a frozen state. It turns out childhood sexual abuse is one of Dee's areas of specialty; I did not know that when I sought her out but the universe did. She had much experience in the arena of dissociation and even shared stories with me (anonymously, of course) about some of her other patients' tendencies and the kinds of modalities they used in therapy sessions to uncover truth and release pain. I was ready to do both.

We began to use The Theatre as our trigger event for EMDR. Progress did not take long. At first I was not able to be "in" the theatre seat for it was much too painful. And so we constructed a visual exercise where I would pull up a comfy brown beanbag in the favorite room of my house and I would surround myself with trusted supporters so that we could watch the "movie" of my trigger event together. It was unsettlingly ironic that we were watching a movie of me watching a movie; it reminded me of the surreal dual reality in Being John Malkovich where people experience life through the eyes and body of another person. Using this technique I could observe and talk about The Theatre as if it were happening to or through someone else.

I had been studying and practicing tonglen, a Buddhist meditation technique, with Em for many weeks. Part of tonglen is gathering the image of people who are loving and supportive to help guide your efforts and energy throughout the practice. Like many meditative exercises, I did not consciously choose the visions and people who came to me; it is inner wisdom that presents exactly what is needed. In my case the figure of Christ is behind my right shoulder, St. Francis is on my left, and standing behind me are my two spiritual teachers Gyandev and Diksha who reside at an ashram in California that I have frequented in my yoga study.

At first when constructing the comfort zone from which to view The Theatre for EMDR, all 4 of my supporters joined me. But when we turned on the movie of my movie, I had to ask Gyandev and Diksha to leave. I was overwhelmed with the shame of what we were getting ready to observe and I could not bear for them to see it. It was ok for Jesus and St. Francis to stay because they weren't "real people" and henceforth it was always just the three of us.

I could write many details about what I know now about The Theatre and the variety of healing techniques Dee and I used to integrate this event. There are three things that are most mentionable here: the connection of The Theatre to the steps of my dissociative process, the arduous work and my body's response to repeated reprocessing of this event, and the ways in which I have been freed from the trauma through EMDR.

Through EMDR I came to understand that the details of this event are specifically and intentionally linked to each step in my dissociative process as witnessed by The Watcher in Israel's Key. It goes like this:

• At the moment of "touching not ok" my ears are flooded with the sound of my heart beating in sheer terror and panic. The throbbing is so loud that it deafens me to the point where I can no longer hear anything else.
• I become the stone statue so as not to feel the monster touching me. This survival mechanism allows me to pretend it isn't happening, but it also produces a sensation of extreme heaviness (stone is rather weighty, after all) and so first my arms and then my chest feel like lead.
• I am so ashamed of what he is doing to me. There are people in The Theatre around us and I am terrified that someone will see. I realize that if I am not careful, I will let loose a whimper or some sound of distress that might call attention to this horrid situation. And so I stop breathing so that I won't cry or make a sound. Please God, don't let anyone hear or see.

The set where I had this last revelation nearly did me in. In the EMDR state of dreamlike knowing and reliving, my body put up a tremendous fight. I gagged to the point that I felt certain I would vomit all over Dee's lovely green couch. This would happen several times over the course of the next few months but I am happy to report that I never actually threw up. (I share more on the subject of my body's keen use of nausea and vomiting as a coping mechanism for trying to "rid" myself of these demons in a post titled On Shame.) I shook, I cried, I held my breath, I curled up in a ball. I regressed to a childlike state of frozen terror. It was one of the most awful things I have ever experienced. I say 'one of' because there would be many more moments like this to come for it is a necessary part of the reprocessing and desensitization process. In all honesty, it is hell on Earth.

Gradually I was able to "sit" in The Theatre instead of watching the movie of it. I was able to relive, re-experience, remember, reprocess and then make peace with this trigger event. Once we peeled back the layers of this trauma onion I was also able to recover a great deal of detail about the scene - peripheral vision, position of people around me, what I was wearing, and the movie(s) that were playing because, as it turns out, this happened more than once. It took a tremendous amount of work and effort but it was both necessary and worth it. 

A wonderfully healing facet of EMDR is that through diligent practice, the survivor is able to change the trauma memory into something more comfortable, palatable, livable. It is through this event molding process that the survivor becomes empowered, protected, and safe. For me this happened when I was finally able to visualize my adult self - Big Me - coming into The Theatre, kicking my abuser out of his seat, sitting down with Little Me and covering her up with a blanket (so as to be safe, warm, protected from harmful touching) while we proceeded to watch the movie together complete with popcorn and Twizzlers. This initial introduction of Big Me and Little Me would become a powerful healing tool that Dee and I would call upon again and again in the months to come.

Similar to my EMDR success with mother's suicide attempts, I am now able to talk about The Theatre without mind-body trauma symptoms. Well, almost. I am still haunted by the truth of this memory and I grieve its occurrence, but I am able to acknowledge and speak about it without being overcome by it. This process took many weeks, some with 2 long EMDR sessions and emergency phone calls in between to help me get a grip. During this time I was still traveling for work and wearing the face of success, which felt a lot more like a heavy shield. Life. Was. Exhausting. But all of this was critical for my healing journey. Though I did not know it at the time, unraveling The Theatre was only the beginning of recovering full memory of the abuse I suffered. A breadcrumb indeed.

The Black Oil

When I returned from Israel I had a host of revelations to share with my therapist, Dee. We had been working primarily on uncovering the cause of my Breakthrough Crisis. For many months we focused on the failed and dysfunctional relationship with my schizophrenic mother, largely centralized on issues of abandonment. We used EMDR to process specific memories I had about being abandoned, hovering on a trigger event I named The Driveway (see Growing Up With Schizophrenic Mother for details on this occurrence.)

We had made little progress focusing on The Driveway because, as it turns out, this was not the root cause of my dissociation. The most I could get to was that I, in fact, fully dissociated in that moment of abandonment and remained in that state for some number of months. It wasn't until Israel's Key that we could begin intelligent dialogue on the nature of my dissociation. After outlining the specific steps of my dissociation as witnessed by The Watcher, we now had the means to begin unlocking the vault of secrets that lurked far beneath the surface of my conscious cognition.

Dee asked me ideate on the most disturbing part of my dissociative pattern. Our new focus was the point of ascendence - the moment I leave my body. We began to intermingle this focal point with my then fixation on the feeling of being "trapped" - having no choice but to assume responsibility for my mother's well-being, safety and care from a very early age. Dee insisted that I did indeed have a choice in the matter and that I wasn't trapped but had made a decision (conscious or un-) to assume care for my mother. We argued about this point for a few sessions and it elicited a disproportionate amount of anger within me. I never had a choice, or so I thought. It was this revelation of choice, coupled with EMDR and a newly found language for my dissociation, that became a major turning point in my healing journey.

During a particularly intense EMDR set, a new awareness arose within me the likes of which I had never experienced. Anyone who has been through structured therapy or even engaged in thoughtful dialect with a close friend can relate to the fact that when people say things they think might be true for you one of two things happens. Either you contemplate the advice and decide that it is not relevant for your story, or you get that unmistakeable stabbing feeling in the pit of your being with full understanding of the deep and painful truth that was just presented to you. The latter is what happened to me on this occasion.

Dee is a gifted therapist with an uncanny ability of giving me back the same information I give her but with a genius spin, a way of seeing things that immediately and spontaneously unlocks the source of my neurosis. With her gentle yet poignant prompting, I was overcome with the horrific (and later liberating... much later) truth that I was not trapped in caring for my mother. I was not the trappee. Quite the contrary, I was the trapper. In my mind-body's wisdom and desperate need to pull this woman close to me, I had successfully trapped my mother. I constructed a circumstance by assuming fiduciary and legal responsibility for her that prevented her from being able to abandon me. Ever. Again. I was the Trapper Keeper (Trap-her Keep-her). The knowledge and deep truth of this nearly overwhelmed my psyche.

The result of this deep knowing was that Dee witnessed my dissociation right then and there in her office. The idea that I forced my mother into a relationship of need with me was sickening, repulsive, disgusting. How could I do such a thing? Furthermore, how could I have done it without realizing this was my motive? My journal entry from this experience reads:

This truth is like swallowing Black Oil and now it lives inside of me. At first I wanted to vomit, this idea is so repulsive and shameful - get it out of me! I felt myself leaving my body, first the muffled hearing, the heavy arms - so heavy like lead - and then the top of my head coming off. I'm slipping into unconsciousness. Escape. Going, going, gone.

Dee watched as I gagged, shook, cried, and then stopped breathing. I distinctly remember hovering "above" myself wondering, worrying if I might die from suffocation. This went on for what felt like an eternity; without prompting from Dee to breathe I very well may have suffocated. Thank God Dee was paying close attention; her careful observation and calm, soothing voice would become a great source of comfort for me. Finally, someone was watching out for me. But each time I tried to re-enter my body by breathing and feeling, the Black Oil pushed me back out.

The Black Oil is so heavy on my chest, thick in my lungs, that there is no room for air. That's it! There is no room for anything inside here because all the available space is taken up by this icky stuff. I'm not sure where it came from but I am full of it. I can feel tears streaming down my cheek, falling like constant raindrops from the clouds of my eyes. I feel my lip quivering. I can feel! This means I am back in my body. I try to look at the Black Oil, to connect with whatever this emotion is inside my chest, hiding from me and taking up all the space, weighing down my chest with heavy bricks. But I can't look at it. As soon as I get a glimpse, I am once again outside of my body and aware that I am not breathing.

This cycle repeated for some amount of time and several EMDR sets: tears, lip quiver, inside, try to look at the Black Oil, stop breathing, out again, the forced exit. I was exhausted by these sets; it felt like an epic battle for my conscious presence. Without the pulsing in my hands from the tappers and soothing comfort from Dee I would be completely lost. Numb. Dead.

Dee wanted to use our last set to help me find comfort and peace. I tried to enter my Safe Place. I had been there a thousand times in mindful meditation practice, but in this instant I could not find it.

I am searching down a country road and there is nothing. Now I see it far in the distance, my beloved forest of mossy trees. I move toward it, but as I look around I see that I am bringing the Black Oil with me. No!!! I don't want to taint this holy place with the Black Oil! It is bubbling all around me - behind, below, above, on both sides - and it is starting to move faster than I can. It's going to beat me to the Safe Place and then it will overtake and forever ruin it. I'll never be able to come here again if the Black Oil gets to it! This place is precious to me; I must save it. And so I open my eyes to regroup. Follow the light bar, pick something else - ANYTHING else - to distract the Black Oil. The opposite of black is white. Something white. I look down at my dress; it has birds. I love birds. White birds. Think of a happy place with white birds. Sanibel Island! 

I'm safe.
I can breathe again.

--------

I have come to understand that the Black Oil is shame. Deep, deep shame. I have also come to understand that the veil of Black was, in fact, protecting me from things I was not yet ready to see or know. It is important for any survivor to understand that the mechanisms your mind-body, though incredibly frustrating and painful at times, are superbly functional. Trust the process, trust your mind-body, trust your own healing powers. True, deep wisdom and the ability to heal resides within us all.

Dee and I would eventually uncover the root of my Black Oil/Shame Demon but not for many weeks. In the meantime I did a lot of research on the nature of shame. The foremost expert in this arena by far is Brene Brown. Without her TED talks on Vulnerability and Shame and her wonderfully insightful and therapeutic book I Thought It Was Just Me, I honestly don't know where I would be. Another lock, another key. I happened upon these resources by chance. Except I don't believe in chance. I believe in the universe bringing exactly what you need at precisely the time you need it.

The student was ready.

Intro to EMDR

I had many failed attempts at therapy beginning in late college. It took quite some time to get my mind-body to cooperate with me in order to get there. My state university had a student health program including low/no cost visits with a campus mental health professional. I tried many times, even going as far to schedule appointments. Each time the appointment day came, I would mysteriously get a migraine that prevented my attendance. Ah, the student was not ready.

It wasn't until I began working full-time that I actually went to my first therapy session. Kris was a jolly, santa-looking man with full white beard and bowl-full-of-jelly mid section. My time with him was brief and relatively meaningless other than to get me comfortable with the therapy experience. I remember no significant breakthroughs during my time with him.

A few years later I worked up the courage and awareness to seek professional help again, this time through my company's Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Having grown partial to all things holistic, I searched for and found a therapist whose philoshopies aligned with mine; her name was Elle. I loved seeing Elle and did so for more than a year. She played fluty new age music in the waiting room which felt a lot like yoga nidra. I was safe in her office.

Elle introduced me to a technique called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). She helped me understand that what I had witnessed and continued to experience in my adult life was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. The nightmares, anxieties, and flashbacks from my mother's first suicide attempt were the focus of our work together.

Simply put, PTSD causes trauma survivors to hold onto memories in the wrong place. There are specific areas in the brain designed for housing and categorizing memories of people, places, and events. But when trauma occurs including life-or-death situations and abuse, memories get trapped in alternate parts of the brain and in the nervous system. This is why a survivor will still feel and elicit panic and debilitating fear even when no actual stressor is present; when triggered, the nervous system remembers and recreates the trauma situation, sometimes over and over again. The goal of EMDR is to alleviate and eliminate these trauma-like experiences so that the survivor can live a panic free life.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy treatment that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories. Memories that are "stuck" can be processed and integrated so that the accompanying exacerbated emotional turbulence can also be alleviated. In some ways, EMDR is like wakeful dreaming. Dreams occur in the lightest stage of sleep known as REM - rapid eye movement. Likewise, EMDR uses repeated lateral eye movement to recall, enhance, associate, and develop new insights for painful memories. Thus the word REprocess. These things were not completed processed or correctly stored in the brain the first time around; EMDR helps to put memories in their proper order and place - namely, out of the nervouse system and into the functional parts of the adult brain.

EMDR work centers around a target scene. The work is done in "sets," usually 1-2 minutes in length, whereafter the client and therapist briefly discuss the memories and insights that arose during the set. A set involves using synchronized hand tappers, lightbars and/or headphones emitting beeping sounds alternating from left to right.

With this technique, Elle helped me process the vivid mages I had from the apartment and the hospital. There was one specifically horrific image from the hospital that my mind-body had molded its fear around: that of my mother lying on the gurney being wheeled away from me, hands outstretched, pale as a ghost, with a black mouth from the charcoal solution they made her drink to absorb toxins. She looked like a classic horror movie monster. That image had haunted me for over 15 years.

Interestingly, all kinds of other memories surfaced during my EMDR sets. Things happening in my life around the time of the incident. Feelings, people, events; longings, fears, disappointments; pleasantries, hope, healing. It really is an amazing process to help offset unpleasant memories but also to recapture the lost self which becomes fractured and hidden in the face of trauma. This technique was particularly easy for me to both relate and connect to, and it was the first great success and source of healing I experienced in therapy.

Another interesting thing about EMDR is that it elicits all kinds of "body stuff" - physical formations and remembrances of fear and panic trapped inside the body. In my sessions with Elle I always, always felt pain in my arms. In fact that is the barometer we would use to begin and end our sessions - by the weight and usefulness of my arms. During particularly difficult memories my arms would become heavy like lead to the point where sometimes I could not move them. That was my first experience in recognizing that I had bodily manifestations of fear. Elle and I never talked about the origin of this body communication. It would be years and therapists later before I began to comprehend. What I have learned since then is that everything has meaning. Everything. There is an explanation and origin for everything the mind-body uses to communicate its pain and past.

(Note: as I typed this last paragraph I am experiencing the arm heaviness, as I have in constructing most of these blog entries. Even after years of hard work and healing I still have this fear manifestation.)

Prior to my time with Elle, I could not and had not really ever talked about my mother or the traumatic events I experienced in relation to her. I am happy to report that today I can have an intelligent conversation about the matter. It is not robotic; I can feel and express the sadness and grief I have from going through this. I am simply able to express and process it as an adult, not frozen in a childlike state of terror. I do feel healed from the trauma portion of this part of my story.

The residual psychological and behavioral results are a different matter. It's much like peeling back layers; I had to get through the outer layer of trauma before I could even begin to delve into the deeper wounds. The horrific images and frozen memories prevented me from getting to or even seeing anything else. In some ways, and as absurd as it may sound, PTSD protects the survivor from accessing things for which the student is not ready. It takes time and a variety of healing modalities to get to and process all layers of the trauma onion. Fortunate for me, I was and still am determined to heal from my experiences no matter what or how long it takes.

Israel's Key

In November 2012 I traveled to Israel on a spiritual quest. My close friend Jet came to see me off from Newark. Jet and I had been on and off friends/lovers/friends/enemies - rinse and repeat - for a couple of years. Relationships are not easy with an ASCA, so I admit to being 50% of the problem. The same is true for my failed marriage and the wake of destructive relationships I left trailing behind me before that. The nature of this friendship with Jet is pertinent because the dissociative button is often easily pushed by someone approaching intimate closeness.

Jet and I got into an argument in the middle of EWR. A series of no-fault events had left us stranded for the night with no place to sleep and me with an international departure in the morning. Jet blamed me for the incident and proceeded to explain the nature and extent of his anger in this crowded public place. I was feeling very upset at being blamed for something that was not my fault. And then it happened. I began my typical dissociation tailspin with one exception this time. The Watcher remained conscious, nonjudgmental (because the rest of me is constantly judging myself all the time), and secretly documented everything that happened for later mental retrieval. This is how it goes:

• First I lose my hearing. I can see people's mouths moving, but everything is muffled. I can't talk either. I usually don't have anything to say because my brain is short-circuiting, but even if I did it is like the muscles that surround my lips are frozen.
• Next my arms feel heavy like lead. I distinctly remember sitting at the airport, laptop open, wanting to google hotels but I literally could not mobilize the muscles in my left arm up to the keyboard. It simply wouldn't move so I just sat there staring at it. Arms completely stuck at my sides, meanwhile The Watcher's running script documented the words 'like rigor mortis.'
• Next the heaviness from my arms moves into my chest, and then my whole body goes numb. I feel myself exit through my head; it sort of feels like the top of my head coming off. This is not like the near-death experiences I've read where people talk about being able to see themselves from above. It is difficult to explain; it's more like being behind and slightly above myself, though not exaggeratedly so like hovering around the ceiling. I'm close to my body, I'm just not in it.
• Then I stop breathing. I did not know I was a breath holder until The Watcher revealed this to me. This part is actually quite scary. While watching myself from above/behind I begin to fear that I will suffocate. My journal entry for this reads "I honestly don't know how oxygen is getting into my blood because there is no air passing in or out of my body. If indeed I am breathing I cannot feel it at all, no matter how hard I try." I remain in this breathless state for some unknown period of time until something zaps me back in. Then I either go through the round of ears-arms-numb-breathless state again or stay in and move on to the next tortuous state.

When I come back into my body, then the pain begins. I suppose this is why I dissociate for as long as possible because I fear the pain of being human (as opposed to the stone statue). The mental chatter is maddening, hyper self-critical, and the emotional pain that comes with it is nearly unmanageable. Whatever the situation is, I catastrophize it to death. "This is the worst thing ever." "I can't deal with this." "I'm not strong enough." "I have to get out of here." If dissociation is the mental/emotional flight response, then my last stage of dysfunction here is physical flight. I start to concoct all the ways I'm going to end the relationships, the circumstance, the problem, etc. so that I never have to face or feel this again.

It was fascinating to observe myself go through all of these stages with such a clear minded Watcher. I am a psychologist getting to study the human psyche from the inside. Jill Bolte Taylor speaks of her similarly fascinating experience of being a brain scientist studying the human brain from the inside while she had a stroke in her TED talk called Stroke of Insight. I can so relate. I was in there too.

Jet had no idea I was experiencing my dissociative cycle. To the outsider it looks like I am ignoring and punishing them with silence. They couldn't possibly know the whirlwind of turmoil and pain that is happening inside of me. How could they? These are normal situations; people get mad when things don't go well and there's nothing wrong with that. You fight, figure it out, make up, and go on with your day. At least that's what happens for normal people (I'm guessing). I bet this is one of the major reasons being in a relationship with an ASCA is so difficult. From the outside it looks like we make a big deal out of everything. The truth is, on the inside everything IS a big deal. Everything looks, smells, and feels like trauma. 

It gets worse. Not only are my responses to seemingly small events disproportionate in the moment, but then I can remain in a robot-like state for hours, days, or even weeks. This looks like more punishment to the outsider, but inside I am dying. I can't feel. I'm not Me. I criticize myself for how I reacted in the moment and am left wondering what the hell is wrong with me. On the outside it looks cool and dry, but that's only because I don't know who I am or how I feel. My theory here is that every time I dissociate, a part of me stays outside and does not come back in. I am left feeling less whole, less integrated. As the severity and frequency of these cycles increase, I end up feeling completely robotic and not like Me at all. My ex-husband used to call me Ice Princess. In his defense, I never shared any of this with him because I had no language for it, nor did I understand the origin of my dysfunction. I imagine that many ASCAs can relate to this experience in relationship, both the dysfunction within and the ultimate painful demise.

Jet is sweet and he apologized in the terminal. I came to. We found a hotel. When we got there I went into the bathroom to freshen up for a dinner and I experienced the dissociative cycle again, and all stages were documented by The Watcher. Then it happened for a third and final time in the bathroom. There was no trigger per se, except that I was pondering the fascination of it all. Perhaps The Watcher needed more detail for the script, the one I was writing internally for Dee so that we could use it in my EMDR sessions. 

Fortunate for me, the flight to Tel Aviv is 14 hours. I had plenty of time to journal about my newly understood dissociative cycle in great detail. I had a wonderful time in Israel, but much work was to be done upon my re-entry. The Watcher had found the key.

The End of the Beginning

My story starts in the middle, as it is still being written. In fact I'm quite sure this will be a life long endeavor. As an ASCA (adult survivor of child abuse) there are many twists and turns along the healing journey required to evolve from victim to survivor, and then hopefully to thriver.

I've lived most of my life outside of my body, thus the chosen domain name for my site. The human mind-body (I will often refer to these as one entity because, contrary to Western thought, the two are inextricably intertwined) basically has three options when faced with trauma: fight, flight, or freeze. When a child experiences trauma, especially in the case of sexual abuse, the most common response is to freeze. There is no escape; there is only endurance. At the hands of a so-called trusted adult, the shock and agony of betrayal is too excruciating to bear in real-time and so the child creates a false escape from painful reality by leaving the body. This is called dissociation.

Dissociation is an altered state of consciousness wherein a person, in this case Little Me, detaches from physical and emotional experience. During the times when I was molested, my chosen path for dissociation was to pretend I was a stone statue. I distinctly remember thinking that if I could just remain perfectly still, not breathe, and not feel, then somehow it wasn't happening. This allowed me to withstand the unnatural, confusing, and shameful acts of violation that were being committed. Through blissful dissociation, those things were happening to my body, but not to me. The real Me was drifting somewhere outside of my body, waiting for it to be over so that I could return to myself.

Dissociation is a survival mechanism that served me well from ages 5-13, from the time the abuse started up to and including when I was locked in a basement and raped. I am convinced the only reason I survived those insidious attacks with any fortitude is because I was fully dissociated. The problem is, once the mind-body latches onto dissociation, this learned behavior becomes ingrained and automatic. And as an adult, it is quite dysfunctional in typical life settings. Many non-traumatic experiences would trigger my dissociation, at times rendering Big Me nearly incapable of handling normal life. This lasted for 25 years.

I had little to no memory of the experiences that produced my dissociative reaction. (A single memory remained intact which I write about in a later post called The Theatre.) Consequently, I have spent most of my life in a state of disillusioned pain, unable to deeply connect with others or have a trusting, intimate relationship. That is, until I cracked.

In August 2012 I experienced what I now understand was a Breakthrough Crisis. This was a tumultuous time - almost 3 months - of confusion, hypervigilance, and suicidal ideation the source of which I could not comprehend. It has taken me this long to make sense of what I was and am still going through, thanks to the help of some wonderful therapists, resources, and supportive friends and family.

I'm happy to say that even though this breakthrough-meltdown-breakdown-spiritual awakening process had been inordinately painful, I am grateful that it happened/is still happening. Without it, I would not have the hope of integration, the process of bringing all the pieces of my dissociated self back into my body and becoming fully Me. I'd like to say that I am there, but the truth is it may be many years before that happens. Thus the journey, thus the blog, thus the hope that my story and my healing journey can be a source of comfort and inspiration as others have been for me.

Winston Churchill's famous End of the Beginning speech was delivered soon after it appeared that the Battle of Britain in WWII was going to be won. He wanted to communicate hope, but also a realism where the country was on its journey toward winning the war. My intentions are much the same for my audience. I had to wait until I was ready and able to communicate coherently about my journey. It is far from over, but I have learned enough to share something of value. In this I find great healing and great hope. For there is always hope.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.